


[In the] Blood (Murmur)

by blindtaleteller



Series: Platovember Prompts 2020 [11]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Death Fix, Emotional Baggage, Gen, Manipulation, Mutilation, Pain, Past Character Death, Platovember, Platovember 2020, Rage, Slavery, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:08:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27555118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blindtaleteller/pseuds/blindtaleteller
Summary: What do you get when a pushy wizard keeps at getting answers he really isn't one hundred percent ready for; and agrees to a trip through a very vengeful jotun mage and blood witch's memories to quicken his understanding? A trip through a level of trippy-crazy town even Stephen Strange has never seen the likes of to date, that's what.Lesson one: at forty some years at best, no human mage can keep up with a thousand five hundred years of discipline worthy of naming Loki the greatest sorcerer belonging to a society of people who were only -almost- halfway through a single generation's lifetime from Christs' death to the current age.Lesson two? Making Loki and his adopted sister mad, really; mad? Can be a scary thing just to look into the mouth of.. never mind actually having it aimed at you.
Relationships: platonic - Relationship
Series: Platovember Prompts 2020 [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999015
Kudos: 3
Collections: Loki, Platonic Relationships, Prompted Writing





	[In the] Blood (Murmur)

**Author's Note:**

> Door 10 DREAMS out-take.  
> WARNING! This dips into the overlaying story of DREAMS, in regards to where Laufeyson from door 10 was for five years and in what company/state he was kept after his apparent death in Endgame: which is pretty dark. If you can't deal with things like dismemberment, mutilation, torture, slavery and the like even at a mention: this is not the short for you.
> 
> This one was tough to flesh out, in part because Leigh's bloodscape is really tough to put in words. I did it I think once or twice aside from this out-take from DREAMS, and only used one in the first chapters for this reason.  
> The best way o approach this mentally, is to think of the scary astral trip The Ancient One sent Stephen on when he first came begging at her door: but inverted. What I mean by inverted, is that firstly, this dimensional world exists solely inside Leigh: and secondly that it is almost always shrouded in darkness. Both for the facts of it's sheer size and weight of her memories --which they only barely graze-- and the fact that darkness is representative of how she maintains what sanity and purity she has left: by keeping the past shrouded and out of sight until she needs it. A habit she and Loki share, in DREAMS; and one of the many reasons he recognizes her as a kindred soul over the course of the five years he was in MASTER'S custody after Infinity War in his AU, and in her care prior to their joint escape.

  * IDENTIFY LOCATION: LAUFEYSON - INTER-DIMENSIONAL IDENTIFICATION CONFIRMED : HVRA0616-9H-02
  * \---INTER-UNIVERSAL DOORWAY ENTRY POINT H2 : OBSERVATIONAL STATUS - TVA INTERFERENCE: _!THREAT LEVEL THREE_ _DETECTED  
_
  * \----TERRA/EARTH : **UNKNOWN VARIANT AGANA-615-E : HEMI-CEREBRAL CONNECTION IN PROGRESS**
  * **\--=** : EXTREME I.U.T. VISITATION CAUTIONS _ADVISED_ : AVENGERS COMPOUND, UPSTATE NEW YORK
  * \------KNOWN DOMESTIC TIME VARIANCE : TERRAN VARIANT INITIALIZED : 9:56 AM US EST



**-{//B L O O D//}-**

The first thing he knew, was the music.

It wasn't that he knew the tune. Or that he could understand the words, sliding around and between them. Just that he knew it was there.

Not just in the air; if that was what it could be called: if that was what it was, that thin-thick slip of silence between.

No, even though he felt his eyes wide open; no matter how many times he closed them tight and tried again; he wasn't sure what it was. Where he was. Whether even he was standing. Or sitting. Or lying down. Which was nothing new for Loki in this place; but knowledgeable as he was of it, he knew and could sense Stephen's slow rising panic right behind him. The blindness in the dark between, the lack of comparative sense was always disorienting if one wasn't prepared for it; and even as the new Sorcerer Supreme: the God of Mischief knew very well that this silence, absolute in everything save the song? Was not something Stephen Strange had been prepared for. He had likely glimpsed worlds and universes of endless color. The pure, explosive edges and still running streams of Chaos.

But he had never been invited into one of it's epicenters. Never been dipped into the infinitely minute depths of any of what was always at it's heart. He knew when Strange saw her coming; the sudden spiderweb thin snap and reach of gilding like a live and visible wire in sharp gold and blushing, bleeding reds as that beautiful thing reached for them both through the massive, unlit, wide open expanses of that deep mind: flickering illumination across the never-ending motion that otherwise was unseen from their divided perspectives as guests amongst the thoughts and memories in her mind. Faces and machinery, voices and breaths and songs.

Images of almost light captured in the small, hummingbird like flight as it skipped through all of these formed and formless things passing through her six hundred or so remembered years from there to here when Loki grabbed hold of him as she'd taught him to over the course of his residence and took form. Shifting himself as always between the false face and image Stephen knew, and the dark, colder thing he was under it all, his paigemarks bursting to pale fiery life along his Jotun marks and even a little beyond them. That wickedly mean piece of him kept for better things still enjoyed Strange's shock and fear in the moments before he was recognized under the brow catching ridges of his black crown: so very unlike the gilded hook-horns he was better known for on the good Doctor's world and prominent it held his attention for far longer than the red and then green-grey-blue-again eyes beneath it.

' _Come along Stephen._ ' wasn't so much words as just a mouthful of wicked white teeth in the pure dark, he was sure. ' _Too late for those fears now, hm._ _It's time we caught you up, little Spark._ ' This was not a request, or a choice he could back out on now. He was here and deep in Leigh's blood and there was no backing out once she was reaching, until Leigh herself decided to let go or force him out. He was too small to make a real attempt anyway. Gripping onto him wasn't hands or arms or magic per say as Strange knew it. And that scared him too. Truly frightened him as the first little sparks of his consciousness settled into the small, soft rhythm of the song regardless.

The surprise, when that winding quick lash of light was whipped around them both and pulling them fast and beyond measurement of speed through it all fast towards that tiny spec at the heart of the place like a pair of insects being yanked into the mouth of a frog that had already swallowed a firefly or ten whole, made Loki laugh. He couldn't help it. But he could quiet, to hear the familiar rush again. The beat of a half a million hearts. Screams and pleas when they zipped past the victims in her blood; in her mind. The flaying of skin and tearing, sawing, division of limbs and softer bits registering briefly as solid things between the unseen walls and wandering the darkened blinded hallways. The faces of others, the twisted smirk and cold indifference and joyful little giggles of their captors.

Always blood, the red caught by the gilding light among the near silent cacophony writhing in pain and horror and every piece of torture in every way they had been endured. The snapping stop of the forward pull only letting go to allow them to drift through the murmuring hum of the beat of the music. The unceasing beat of one heart, joined with another as the tumble forward through everything and nothing. Stephen was still whirling from the trip as they slowed from the release through the low caress of the branches of the not-tree.

There was some small first, observing him; this human drifting through the terrible beauty of Leigh's inhuman mind and soul when he realized what the tree was. Not branches but the light and pulse of a million and more veins, pulsing and beating with the music at it's heart, the murmur of trillions upon trillions of cells that spoke and answered to it with their own voice in the chorus: and tens of thousands of times more than that dim in the distance, disconnected and yet nowhere near dead. Flickering like out of focus lanterns even farther in the distance. Their brush was soft and welcoming, and for the first time, Lau was able to feel the wild mixture of confusion and wonder and absolute awe as Strange realized where he really was, and what trust he was being given in this odd, insular company of theirs he was now a conscious part of with his presence.

Laufeyson watched, felt and turned allowing the current remaining to carry him alongside Stephen when he finally let go: and allowed Strange to stretch out, so careful and curious and afraid to break the kind of spell that needed no ingredients or items, incantations or motions but the beat of a heart and the lovely turn of a deep mind to give. Lau smiled, enough that it caught Stephen's attention and reminded him he was there between the branches of her life; when he caught the first edges of uncontrolled return: saw and felt the first responding memories that Stephen almost recoiled at unintentionally handing out.

The first sounds and at first blurry images and breaking moments looking at the ruin of his hands after the accident. The first fire-soaked lines of glass piercing his knuckles when they went through the dash. The stab of something dark and un-named into his chest, a dagger made of poison he didn't know from a realm he could only name with a crassly vague four letter word. An explosion of life and light that ended the living part of the same man's self to make his flesh squirm and follow into stillness. Four million harried viewings buzzing by his mind in desperation on another world Loki, Lau; knew better than he wanted to. Celt's death, the wide breadth of her smile lit by lightning amongst the snowfall against the will of the very element of existence she had once held at her breast: Time. A thing that barely existed, here; but skipped by anyway, at the leisure and need and whim of this one creature when a guest.

There were operations under shaking walls and the pressure of shots fired somewhere outside. The power coming and going and losing some of them just to that. Loki knew New York in those for what they were and turned a colder eye to it as he had to; having known that would be a part of it. Better a hundred or a few hundred than half of another world; and that thought, that expression reached Stephen even past his own control for the piece of black rage it still touched in himself. The venom and absolute rancor itching under his skin for the fools and the real madmen that would have been sent in his place. And he was fairly certain Strange saw them, identified them; before he pulled the poison back into it's shell and away from his knowing.

And then, there was Anthony's handsome and weary worn face, a breath he knew and compared to the one he had worn as far back as that day. Determination and force of pure, beautiful defiance Loki was all the prouder for seeing _still there_ in that one singular moment almost ten years forward from their one true meeting at the top of the tower he had thrown him from when Tony had held up his hand and known the price he was about to pay. Loki saw the face of the daughter he left behind, and the wife whose smiles he knew still were not quite the same, even without asking or looking.

And might never be again unless they did something about it. Lau, wasn't sure they should. But the thought he might try, just once; later. Just for that singularly true and beautiful moment of Chaos.

_'Thank you, for that._ ' needed to be expressed, because it was something he hadn't realized he had a need to see. _'Collect yourself, though she'll help you in a moment or two; if you can't.'_

_' -are, we?_ ' was broken and scratchy, but a more focused response than the jumble of none the less; and the vengeful King smiled and wondered briefly if that was how he had sounded; the first time.

He found his voice again as they drifted to a stop near enough the great trunk's thrumming murmur of a whispered, constant song to sound like thunder through everything. " This is her. A place magic can't reach so easily; and almost never completely. Your mind, is only a small part of you, here. Pull in the rest, and you'll find the form that fits you best. Your training in Astral projection will help; though not by much. This is more. A plane of pure energy, folded into the infinite growth, experiences and possibilities of a single soul. Expanded upon, by our presence.. and the presence and memory of the thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions even whose selves have been touched and connected and died and lived walking the bridge of her blood. "

_' -s this----n Leigh?'_ was clearer, but warbled still from Strange, and scratched with the static of his attempts at pulling his instruction together; before she was on the string of dark light he was in this place with a huff and laugh and tumbling of wound up energy as if he had summoned her, which he probably had. Either that or his pixie-sister had just been waiting in the swinging song of her own mind to hear him start to focus and guess at her before the sudden surge of self was wrapping and pushing and pulling and all but strangling his half assed attempts into better form.

" He's so sparkly." echoed when she was free not a moment or three later, and Strange was still reeling in his concentrated, bound together self from the sudden motion and compression both.

Lau couldn't help but chuckle at his wild feel and near panic with her sudden 'attack.' _'..the hell was that!'_ from him though seemed to come about around the same time Stephen realized not only was he audible to some degree even to himself, but also very much a notable creature now, rather than the collection of odd glimmering smoking shadow-shapes and little pricks of pin-thin light he had been manifesting as prior. And perhaps, he also realized they were moving again too: if at a slower pace.'You said, this was the fastest way to show me what I've missed and what you haven't shared; and this is what you get to?' offense, and anger, and confusion, all of which had an interesting affect on his form in the expression of flickering glitter like bursts from Celt's apprentice.

And maybe Loki might have let a few things slip from himself, thinking that; for the sudden stop and silence, the proverbial eyeless stare Strange gave him for the nearly _dozen_ _centuries worth_ of memories stretching from fond and frightening, to beautiful and baneful, through times before Strange was so much as the smallest thought of a stitch in history's tapestry as either he or even Loki himself knew it. He knew he saw the ball, the halls stalked by lich shades. And perhaps the first intent filled luring peek of eyes deeper than wells and pale slippery smooth eels-skin through the very edge of the surface of snowy waters on the docks in London he had once mentioned; promising so much more than the drownings their kind were known for to drag the breath and beat and blood song from any creature teeming with edible life. _'..was that what I think it was._ '

" What do you think it was?" was almost gleeful from Leigh as her simmering, steamlike wisp of a self circled and dodged around them; through them even, though he did not think Stephen noticed that. Or refused to notice it, more the like.

' _..a memory? I saw .. Celt. And maybe a mermaid?_ ' Yes, then, he had seen.

" London, yes. You reminded me of it just then, and the ball with those nasty, not quite undead things in fifty seven. I will try to keep unnecessary information from seeping out. "

' _Those were real? What about.. what about the rest?_ ' and he seemed to be distracted a moment by the fact he had started to notice their motion finally.

" Those were real, yes. If a memory is strong enough here, it can seep through. Though I've only ever experienced that with Leigh. Never with another living and present, presence. " Leigh was singing, the murmured constant of her song stringing from note to note in ways that almost made them one; preparing the way and prodding him time and again for the path they needed to take him along. _'..we shouldn't be wasting this much time though, should we? What's it been; already half an hour?Maybe forty minutes..?'_ made her song turn briefly into a laugh so earnest that it shook everything, and sent a volley of light forward to the writhing mess of flesh and deep dark things waiting at the doors outside of the visible reach of her veins and branches.

Lau's amused knife of a smile spoke for him " Outside, we've hardly taken a third breath. " and pulled Stephen from the sudden focus on that place; the gripping hands and torn tongues and cut still howling silent skulls of victims whose names Strange would never know in numbers he couldn't fathom but still felt in their brief revelation. _'How is that possible?'_

" Everyone thinks faster than they talk, and _reacts_ faster than that. _Every soul sings_ and screams in _beyond it all_ even when we have nothing to say. _Every_ memory remains, there and limited only by what we choose to see and are able to remember. In touch and _taste_ and smell and sound _and everything else_ that only our selves know inside and outside of it all without things like skin and muscle and bone to hold them down and slow the make and take of it. The river of our minds and what stands growing behind it never stops moving. And when it does, it's dead yes and _still_ not done. How fast _is_ the speed of thought? How quick can you or the one next to you know what hurt is, _really?_ That's the pace of the place you're in. Limitless, bound only by the quickness of ...well, _you:_ without the bone and skin and _other_ simple and _slow things._ " Made Loki smile again, all hungry razors and bright pearls at Stephen's very clear comprehension of Leigh's words where she shaped them, and the sense of what they were nearing.

" _Oh yes_ , it's much, _much faster_ than that, in this place; you're _right._ " probably didn't help; but better he get to the cut in the tether, before they lost more of him to the gain of tension. " This bloodied realm is _very real,_ if hard to reach. And yes. The murmurs you hear are too. If mostly in the past, some in the present; and others on the edge of the future _so near enough_ , they may as well be just that. To know what you're keeping in that Marshall in a jar back home; you need to know what she came from. And what is coming behind her. " he knew his sharp edges were sharper as those words settled in his self with the who, and where they resided for him; marked for worse than death.

"You wanted to know about MASTER, and you'll have it; or what of it is important.." was almost a hiss as they bunched together at the side-slanted gaping maw of memory as legs and organs and teeth all opened with a parting breath intent on swallowing them up. " ..you will regret that, I assure you Doctor. But you may be one of the very few prepared for it as well. Keep your wits, and remember these places are memory. Hers for six hundred years.. and mine too, for the five they had me torn spine from soul and more. "

He thought for a moment, Stephen might have objected in the barest fraction of a thought it took for the deep to snap their selves up and suck them through the squelching bloody, sticky warm pain and fetid half rotten first smells and sounds of the saws cutting the pieces of innumerable people still living from their other remaining physical parts. It was a slow ride through the first few explanations, the factories where the Necrocise were taken apart as people and welded together again in near brain dead forms after that wished they were for those few that kept a sliver of their selves, screaming for an end that wasn't allowed to come. Spurred through their mechanical parts and the ordered mall enough to resuscitate their horrid, endlessly excruciating existence and extend it well past their natural lives to continue, and continue, and continue until there might have been perhaps less than a pinprick of a person left behind in the used up flesh Leigh was forced upon and vice versa to breathe and keep their hearts beating, their brains firing just enough to follow orders until they were, inevitably melted down and used as sustenance or extra parts for those who would follow by the thousands.

The eyes of children and men and women and more alike glassed within the unending assembly and disassembly lines behind canisters given all the personality of of MASTERS single brand, and a batch number. No more individual than a single can of soda pop out of the next eleven just like it in line.

The constant connection, the murmur and beat of blood carrying their echoes and pleas for death, for an end unceasing; without mercy, without even the understanding of the word any more. Just repeating, until they lost not only that but the presence to continue even that simple cry. The next stage of living came next, and Strange was already ill. The betweeners, used for other tasks. The ones who hadn't rotted to the need yet but were on their way. Connected to the system and worked to that degradation. The ones worth catching alive and watching from the belly of the beast as the rest, deemed unworthy for the inside of a ship were carried through space in nets and no more so that their dead or still very living corpses could be ripped from life that first time in the passage from whatever atmosphere they had lived under or been traveling in to the icy, pressure less vacuum of space.

From struggling, writhing mass of sentient life in families and cities worth of people, to near frozen mostly preserved dead within minutes; only to be forced back to breath under the saws and implant stampers, and harsh rub of smooth belts moving them from station to station to station while the walking ones were loaded into processing, assessed and stamped for whatever use they were deemed worthy of at the time.

That was the first time, they had to stop.

But it wasn't the last. Strange managed to keep from shattering, mostly by his own will, watching and sensing these things; but he was straining under the weight and press. Lau led the withdrawals, for a change. He knew Stephen better than Leigh, and his tests had showed him more than enough of his comprehensive ability, and limitations in these past weeks preparing him for her to allow him that power even within her own memories. She was watching though, and careful about keeping her own part of it disconnected enough he could form his own thoughts and inevitable revulsion.

When they were done with that long view of the Necrocise and their mostly living future lines; when they were done with the use of her blood to elongate the lives of the Marshalls and their employers: when they were done with showing him the sale of every stage of life and death in between, they stopped again, and pulled back. And let him turn in on himself under a very close watch the same. Loki saw the bubble of what seeing made in him? And almost laughed when Stephen was near to wrapping it up. A familiar thing. Normally, he might have felt guilty, for spreading the disease to this magnitude but. It needed fire to burn it out, and Stephen wouldn't be a part of that black flame if he didn't understand to his fullest.

That was simply how he was.

" You're beginning to understand what I am chasing now, I think. Or at the least you've developed a scent for their blood the same as we have, yes? " he did laugh then, when he could actually feel the shape of eyes on him. Almost accusatory. But.. more forgiving than they had been, and searching; maybe recognizing the hardened shell of what he had and nurtured for himself. The want to not simply smash that machine but eradicate it down to the atom and all it's tiny little parts. " They think they're hunting me, still. And Leigh, yes. But no, not any more. Not with the stones close at hand. Oh.. I don't intend to use all of them. That's too quick an end for MASTER. " and his smile was wide as his soul and three times as black as the ball of hardened rage and more wadded into one corner of it. " You understand yes? A fraction of the things we have seen while you finished my fight with Thanos? Why .. while somewhat satisfying, his death is just.. amusing; compared to what I want and plan for them? "

He had his interest with that, pulling the man back into the mass of self he'd curled himself into. " I think he does. " was a self-affirmation observing Strange as he latched onto the surety of the heart tree again.

" _Maybe._ He feels ready to be sick, still. Or _fight._ I'm not sure which yet. " from Leigh as she hummed her way through the calming again safe brush of her branch-like gilded blood. " All sparkles; and wildfire, and _sputtering little whips of things:_ and **_stuff._** "

" _Heh._ We'll end it there then. Short as that _was,_ I think it's enough. "

**_'No.'_** was firm and surprising, a near demand from Stephen's sparkles and shades among the murmurings of the song still playing, though it had changed since. _'If there's more I want to see it. You showed me her. But you haven't showed showed me your part. If...'_ the breath in told half a thousand more secrets, little whispers and sliding hums of words that Celt hadn't been able to allude to and Leigh was intrigued by in her dangerously faelike curiosity enough to let pass, if carefully.

There was a moment of long silence between them marked only by the beat of Leigh's heart; the thunder of her blood and returning whisper in the dangling, willow-like branches of the veins of her soul that was little more than consideration and measurement of whether he wanted to. And whether or not their new collection of Sparkles and fire sand in their private space would be snuffed out with that experience. " **Fine.** " was brought out finally after a little longer with no give. " You will not, share what you've seen with my pirate, or my hunter. You will not, repeat what you've seen, only that it confirms what I've said before. And.. " a low rumbling breath out or what passed for one deep enough in his self to brush the branches of blood like a harsher, if warmer gale an gust of wind. " ..you will not go farther than I see you able. I don't have the control she has. I want them dead too much to hold back. "

Stephen pulled up his fortitude, and right away Loki knew. Even before they were closing in on the barely hazed memory of his second death, confused and bloody and feeling his own spine in his throat since Leigh had unlocked it for him; that Stephen wouldn't make it through the first surgery two weeks and six more deaths in. But.

Even when he was proved right and Strange was turning over and being pulled out; even when they were pushing and pulling him back where he belonged.

Even when they were coming back around and Strange was holding back the dry heaving over the trash bin Bruce worriedly and hurriedly yanked under his head to keep the potential mess from the floor?

Loki saw it in the hard stabbing glance that was flashed his way past Peter's quick grab to Stephen's shoulder, and the stare Clint was giving Leigh as she came back last.

The thrum and murmur of the black bit of venom, not for him: but for the full understanding of how ugly and unnatural the creature Strange had insisted on guarding from Loki's intended end for the Marshall actually was.

" You okay man? " Sent Strange sitting up and and looking away to nod to Quill's question. It didn't surprise Lau at all that Strange's flash to his feet came next, or that footsteps and fast hand motions had him retreating still sick on the facts of what he'd been shown straight for the innards of the nearest Sanctum away from that pristine, sterile room and the thrumming murmur of Leigh's blood and where it was meant to travel through the covered tubes in the walls. He did hate the stupid things, and the tanks they had built to feed them. Even if Loki _did_ understand why she had felt compelled to drag Banner into doing so to try and balance out the scales.

" He took that well. " His only real comment, between the off put stares of his mates after Strange and the brief look of disbelief from Bruce. Which, still wasn't inaccurate an assessment at all. Most would have stopped far sooner. Most would not have asked for more.

Though, it would have greatly surprised Laufeyson if; should anyone ask what happened during Tayarhin's interrogation: they would get any answer other than the idea that Strange would have completely forgotten about her when pressed. Not of course because he _actually had._ But instead, because Lau sincerely believed he would _very much want to_ so long as no one reminded him of it. And let her rot in a freezer-burnt state, unattended and slowly crisping and shredding to a slow death in whatever container he had decided to put her in. Laufeyson was fully aware with that look; Doctor Stephen Strange had heard enough of that murmured song to possibly, _potentially_ leave it and her right there to meet that end. And not bother to tend Tayarhin's frozen solid parts out again until they were good and truly dead.

Who knew though. Strange had that oath of his still in his head. Loki might be dealt the pleasure himself. Time would have to tell.

The portal was closed before any of the others could ask another question. Loki could wait, rather patiently; for the answer to that one he had himself. He had no intention of bringing the Marshall up, for some time. Not in the slightest. As Leigh wrapped her little arms around Bruce's huge left once detached from the feeder tank with a bright smile and soft hum that mimicked the little _and_ large mumbling murmur of a song within her bloodscape, he knew _very well;_ neither would she.


End file.
